Template translation experiment

Translators, warning: this page is an experiment for an improved system of template translation: there no need to translate it in many languages, see Meta talk:Babylon#Improve the template translation.
Admins: please do not delete this page for now (see the link above).

This experiment is a proof-of-concept of a translation system where the templates can be transcluded in the correct language (either the user language or the page language). This could be useful for multilingual wikis as Meta or Commons.

Although this works in theory and on my test wiki, this doesn’t work well here on Meta because of bug 54579, and partly because of bug 46925.

Try the different situations

Open the following links, corresponding to various situations:

1. Page in English, interface in English
2. Page in English, interface in French
3. Page in French, interface in English
4. Page in French, interface in French

Visualise the result

Languages: wiki="en" page="en" interface="en"

Autotranslated template in the page language: "{{Template translation experiment (page language)}}" gives:

This text is in English and is autotranslated in the page language, with translation being done using the Translate extension.

Date: 12 December 2013

Number: 857,201.19

Autotranslated template in the user interface language: "{{Template translation experiment (user language)}}" gives:

This text is in English and is autotranslated in the user language, with translation being done using the Translate extension.

Date: 11 December 2013

Number: (not possible after the documentation to use {{formatnum:}} with an arbitrary language.)

Technically

The templates are always called with {{Template name}}. Depending of the template, it will be displayed either in the user language or the page language. It is also possible to call a specific language: {{Template name/fr}}.

The first line of the autotranslated template is:

{{#if:{{#invoke:Template translation|getFrameLanguageSubpage}}|

(it is possible to add <nowiki> sections, for exemple with <languages />.)

The body of the template is translated using the <translate> tags and the Translate extension. It is even possible to call a subtemplate "/layout" to separate the layout from the texts.

The last line of the autotranslated template is:

|{{Template name/{{Fallback|Template name}}}}}}

in order to display the template in the user interface language. To display it in the page language, the {{Fallback}} template must be given {{CURRENTCONTENTLANGUAGE}} as second parameter.

Internally, a template called with {{Template name}} will detect that no specific language is requested (i.e. called as "multilanguage"), so it will call a language-specific instance as specified by the {{Fallback}} template (the one on Commons is much more elaborated than the one on Meta, and MediaWiki also now give the fallback chain in Lua). Then, when a language-specific instance is requested, it is displayed.

Discuss

The discussion around this experiment is on Meta talk:Babylon#Improve the template translation, but feel free to discuss on this talk page or on the translators-l mailing list.